


Crowned with the Stars

by impertinences



Category: Velvet Goldmine
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Childhood Trauma, Glam Rock, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Introspection, M/M, Molestation (referenced), Sexual Tension, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-23
Updated: 2016-07-23
Packaged: 2018-07-26 07:08:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7564879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/impertinences/pseuds/impertinences
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is a response to the following prompt:</p><p> <i>Curt and Jack Fairy working on their record while Curt tries to figure out how one, exactly, fucks an androgynous idol.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Crowned with the Stars

**Author's Note:**

> Jack is such a difficult character (he doesn’t even have one line of dialogue in the movie!), but I did my best. I did, however, stray from the prompt a tad – there’s less record making and more angst. Oh well.
> 
> Despite my research, I could not quite pinpoint when the Death of Glitter concert occurs. I tried my best with the timeline too. 
> 
> Beta'd by Daintiestmartyr over at Dreamwidth - thank you, dear!

_Don’t fake it baby, lay the real thing on me_  
_The church of man, love,_  
_is such a holy place to be._  
\- David Bowie, “Moonage Daydream”

 _I will mangle your mind._  
\- Velvet Goldmine

 

It’s 1977, and bad news spreads quickly even in Germany. Brian Slade has murdered Maxwell Demon on a public stage and, in turn, murdered himself. Without its king, glam rock is a bloating corpse in drag with smeared eyeliner and water tracks, left in a back alley with the rest of the refuse and trash. Boys are trading in their silk shirts for leather jackets with chains, their diamond earrings for safety pins, and their dreams for cynicism and guts.

It’s 1977, and soon there will be a funeral masquerading as a concert. All the sequins from an entire decade will end up in the gutter.

It’s 1977, and Curt Wild is drunk, is angry, is aimless and lost in a Berlin apartment with the shipwrecked True Original himself.

Jack is resplendent in crushed velvet pants the color of dried currants. His blouse is dark and silk, open at the throat, and there are delicate silver crucifixes dangling from his ears. He is sharp angles and anorexic bones wrapped in soft clothing. In comparison, Curt looks and feels like something the proverbial cat has brought in from the streets. There is mud on his boots and his dark jeans are ripped. He’s posing like a present even though he’s brought death at his heels. He is bruised and battered from half a decade with Brian, but his raw vitality still brims around his eyes and in his jerky gestures.

Curt has been talking Jack’s ear off for over half an hour, half-perched, half-slung on the corner of a stained loveseat. They aren’t really having a conversation. There’s little reciprocation here, just Curt’s blundering way of abusing whoever will listen to him now.

“The thing is, the fucking thing is,” Curt draws deep on his cigarette, breathing out the rest of his words in smoke, “I think I came onto him.”

“You were thirteen, honey,” Jack says, his voice more neutral in shade than the purple-red smear of his mouth. He keeps filing his long nails, and so he does not look up. He has learned that Curt is best dealt with from a distance.

Curt jerks his shoulder beneath his leather coat in what might pass as a drunken shrug, shoves his hand through his artificially blonde hair, and lights another cigarette with the dying butt of the first one. His nail polish is silver and chipped, two weeks old. He’s all growls and nervous energy, coming down from a few hours of blow, a few years of heartache, and a lifetime of disappointment.

They’ve been in Berlin for over two weeks and have so far only managed to record one cut of a song for their farewell record. Jack isn’t sure the cut will even be approved. His manager, half-drunk with greed despite the declining sales rates, wants a new sound. A swansong-ballad for a decade of glam and decay. But Curt was never meant for ballads, and his sound was only new when aluminum garage bands were still fresh ten years ago. Jack doesn’t care, which is to say that Jack does not worry – has never worried about the business aspect, the financial side of things. Wealth is as immaterial to him as fame.

Jack doesn’t need new. Jack polishes the grime and dust off all of them, in one way another, and brings forth diamonds from the coal.

So when Curt had stalked to his doorstep with six cans of beer in a plastic bag and a fresh pack of Marlboros in his pocket, brooding beneath his eyeliner, Jack had opened the door.

He always opens the door.

 

 

 

\---

 

 

 

It isn’t that Jack Fairy with his ethereal gestures, penciled on eyebrows, and garnet-berry hair reminds Curt of his brother. No, it isn’t that at all. Jack is untouchable, like all true icons; he is himself when all others merely become parodies of their brightly burning stars. He is cigarette-smoke ladders and bottles of cheap merlot, black-colored cigarettes that smell of spice, and a quietness that is neither comforting nor invasive. Curt’s brother was football sweat and grass stains, electric shocks that knocked every vertebra on his spine, and forceful hunger.

He had been 18 when Curt was 13, but Curt doesn’t remember pain so much as heat and spit. He remembers his first injection with the needle better and more vividly than he remembers his brother’s cock. If he were a deeper kind of man, a man who worried about the past instead of soaking it in alcohol and silencing it with drugs, he might think his lack of memory was intentional. But he isn’t, so he doesn’t, and he lets all kinds of substances wreak his veins, his heart, and his ghosts.

No, Curt’s brother isn’t anything like good old Jack, faithful and eternal Jack, mother and father in one to all the fading starlets. But he’s thinking about them both anyway, seeing his brother’s gaze staring back at him from Jack’s eyes.

It’s disarming.

Curt doesn’t like it. He’s never been a fan of fragile things to begin with (Jack looks like a skeleton, a scarecrow, a twig to be snapped); he remembers being eight years old and breaking his mother’s favorite china vase with a poorly aimed baseball. She had warned him about playing inside the house, so when his father saw the mess he’d taught Curt a lesson with his fists instead of his words. Curt’s father was a drinking man who smelled like tobacco and never grinned except in ways that hurt. Rock lore claims he grew up in American trailer parks, prowling with wolves, but Curt didn’t slink off into their shadowy corners until his father forced him to, until that grin and his knuckles and his brother’s hunger threatened to crumble him. If he lived in trailers it was only with friends, the other music lovers and displaced dreamers.

There was not much softness in his childhood, so he hardened himself young and learned to appreciate the sharper elements of life.

Which is why Jack unnerves him. All height and long limbs with little substance.

Jack can walk across a slick stage in six-inch platforms, a glam god in vinyl and leather with glitter on his eyelashes, but the man across from Curt in the studio apartment looks as though he’d bruise from a too-hard kiss. Curt takes a swig from his beer, snubbing out his cigarette in a crystal ashtray, and shrugs out of his jacket. He’s cold almost instantly even though he had been hot seconds before. The air in here feels thick enough to suffocate. He can’t breathe so he drinks again.

Coming back here had seemed like a good idea after their late night spent recording cut after cut, after the streets turned dark and wet, and Curt had to face the realization that he simply had nowhere else to go.

But the place feels like a shrine to a long lost god. Some pagan place of worship. There’s glitter stuck on the floor boards and the furniture smells of moth balls and some damp, sweet scent. It isn’t entirely unpleasant. There are silver streamers half hanging from the ceiling beams and a faded banner with the hand-scrawled words _Glitter is trash and treasure_ in red and black hanging limp from the corner with the kitchenette. There’s too many ashtrays and too many bottles of liquor and too many powder compacts in ivory and too many lipstick tubes in iris and mulberry. There’s chipped teacups on the coffee table with cold tea bags forgotten inside of them, a stack of records next to a turntable, and a thigh-high golden statue of an elephant (Curt thinks it might be some Asian deity or symbol) weathered, chipped, and perched on the iron balcony. There’s at least three half-dead, fading rose bouquets in cheap vases, a whole lot of waste in the air.

And the sound of Jack’s emery board, scratching his nails into points.

It isn’t quite the sound of electric guitars, but it has the same effect.

 

 

 

\--

 

 

 

“Beautiful things often meet violent deaths,” Jack tells him, reaching across his larger form to pick up and sip from a wine glass filled with champagne.

What are they talking about?

Curt smells violets, cigarette smoke, and the dirt under his own nails. He chews at his thumb for a moment. His brain feels itchy and his eyes are tired. He thinks his mouth is swollen, but he doesn’t know why. His attention keeps straying.

“He went out by his own making. That’s better than fading away like the rest of us. A star collapsing in on itself,” Jack smiles at him, dryly.

He remembers thinking about his brother, thinking about the nature of desire, and maybe remembering how Brian tasted like heroin and rum. Curt’s hands aren’t shaking, but he feels a little like he’s jonesing. He makes a noncommittal noise from the back of his throat. Brian, right. Brian and his untimely schizoid fate.

“Not all stars collapse,” Curt counters, meaning it as a compliment.

“Don’t they though?” He asks with a blink and takes another drink of champagne. It makes his mouth wet like a wound.

There’s something about the lilt of his voice mixed with the shape of his mouth that causes Curt to realize their closeness. He stares at the other man’s face; the delicate wrists with his long, pale fingers cluttered by pearl rings; the lacquered curve of his hair, styled into a definitive point on the left that traces the line of his sharp jaw; the crushed velvet encasing the small expanse of his narrow hips, slung so low that Curt can see his bones.

Jack looks like a fading idol, a relic in a forgotten church. He is unstained, and so he is untouchable.

Curt can’t think of tarnishing him, dirtying him with his own hands and his roughness. Maybe because of this he has the conflicting urge to push into Jack’s space, to hear the sound his silk shirt would make if Curt ripped it, to see how much prettier and how much more attainable Jack could be if he were humanized by brutality and rawness.

Brian’s lips were perpetually bee-stung, but not Jack’s. Jack’s mouth is thin, a waxy line to be smeared, to be gnawed at. Curt thinks of biting them, of sucking the lower lip into his mouth while his hands clutch at Jack’s lacquered hair and loosen the gel that holds it in place. He could be beautiful in dishevelment, pants pushed off his hips, the slim, almost feminine body bent over the edge of the loveseat, bearing all of Curt’s weight and the thrusts of his hips.

Curt could do it. He could push forward suddenly and make Jack drop his glass, make it shatter on the floor and spill the champagne. He could do it, and he thinks Jack would let him. That there’s an isolation in Jack that longs to be breached.

In the wake of his quiet scrutiny, Jack smiles, slow and beguiling. It’s an opening, maybe.

Curt huffs, another noncommittal noise, and reaches for his cigarettes.

No, he thinks, if there was an opening, then it was lost within a second.

Besides, some men are better left crowned.

 

 


End file.
